Idol's Wild
by Roadstergal
Summary: A letter from Pierce to his father after the events of Fallen Idol. Mild slash.
1. Chapter 1

Dear dad:

How is everything over there? It's all dullsville over here, of course. Long, lazy afternoons making friends with the rats and wondering if you met their relatives on the lunch tray. Days trying to find a new variant on solitaire, one that's just interesting enough to keep you from kicking the stove to pieces out of boredom. Nights spent trying to seduce the same lovely nurses with the same old lines, even though you'll only get lucky one time out of twenty - and nine out of ten of the times you _do_, you get interrupted by a call to the OR, to do my favorite thing of all - try to save the lives of kids whose voices haven't even changed yet, again and again and _again_, until you even get bored with _that_.

It helps to rant a bit about how horrible the conditions are over here. It makes me feel a little bit better about what I did. Or a little less like scum, more accurately. I screwed up, dad. Like I've never screwed up before. I need you to listen to me, I suppose. I don't know what in hades I expect you to do other than that. I don't need more chiding. I have enough of that to last a lifetime - to last a couple over-here lifetimes, actually. They're pretty short.

I will organize this rationally, as befits a meticulous, organized medical man. And befits me, too. I believe I will put this account in chronological order by Shameful Act.

Shameful Act Number One. Hawkeye once again cannot keep his big mouth shut. This part all started when BJ and I, as usual, were in the Swamp and bored out of our skulls. Radar stopped by with the mail. I've told you about Radar before, dad, but I'll just say again - the three top reasons I'm not absolutely insane at this point in time are BJ, gin, and Radar. No matter how crazy and screwed-up the war gets, BJ will always be calm and collected; he will always love his wife and his kid and smile at the thought of seeing them again and eating their terrible cooking. No matter how crazy and screwed-up the war gets, gin will always be highly alcoholic and present in copious quantities, to numb any feelings I have about what my job here is. And no matter how crazy and screwed-up the war gets, Radar will always be confident that his more highly-educated friends will kiss it and make it all better. It's a charming naïveté; I don't know how he manages to hold onto it, how this kid brings a bit of Midwestern sanity to the den of insanity. I treasure it like a big brother, which of course means that I tease the kid relentlessly and love him dearly.

Enough of the tangents. One additional thing I should mention is that the kid is, as yet, unacquainted with the carnal pleasures the world has to offer. Not a bad idea, really; in a war, sex is a good way to get VD, accidentally raise the population, or some combination of the two. But I wasn't thinking very clearly, that day. I blame the long shift I was shaking off the effects of. I blame the pompous ass who has replaced Frank, and who almost makes me want Frank back again. I'll blame anything but what I really should blame, which is myself for not thinking. I told him to run off to Seoul to find a lady of the evening. BJ gave me one of those _looks_ when Radar left; I threw a sock at it, at the time, but he was right. What _was_ I thinking? Well, maybe that it would demystify all of it for Radar. He still thinks there's something ineffable and magical about sex, something that will make a man out of a boy, not that it's just something that's basically fun, sloppy, and sticky, nothing more. Maybe I thought it would get him a little over that hero-worship he has for me, like there's something special about me because I hump nurses wherever I can find them. Regardless, I sent the kid off to find a prostitute in the middle of a war, and that's such a good idea, isn't it?

I'm sorry. Not 'war.' 'Police action.' We _must_ be correct with our terminology, after all. The bombs and bullets hurt less in a police action.

I thought no more of it until another batch of wounded came in. I started to triage the unintentional check-ins in pre-op, and came across a soldier with a messed-up arm. It's rare to get hit in an arm and not also have some damage close to fairly important parts of your torso, so I pulled him on his back to take a look at the chest. We're so preoccupied with the wounds that we only look at the faces once we've assessed the damage, so it took me a moment to realize it was _Radar_. The kid I had just sent out to have a good time had almost had the time of his life. The thing is - we call him Radar because he can see things coming before they arrive. Why didn't he see the mortar fire coming? Why the hell does he waste his Radar-ness on knowing what we're going to say or what the CO wants, instead of something _important_? Well. I felt sick - even sicker than I usually do when I'm working in the OR. I had to take him myself.

I've done operations on people I know before, but they've always been planned operations, non-panicky things, procedures where basic living is not an immediate and pressing concern. And yeah, sure, I've done some meatball surgery on repeat customers, too, and that makes them friends of a sort. But this is the first time I've had to do this kind of immediate keep-the-kid-alive surgery on someone I truly know and love, and I hope I never have to do it again. At least his injuries weren't all that bad.

Jesus. A little Iowan virgin who should be taking care of animals on his farm at home has his chest and arm torn up, bits of metal and stone and glass everywhere, and it's 'not that bad.' Look what the war turns us into.

Oh, excuse me - 'police action.'

But I patched him up and got him safely to post-op. That should have been the end of it. Hawkeye screws up, Hawkeye does his penance; the kid lives, and maybe we both end up a little wiser. No, a situation is never so screwed up that I can't stick my big nose in and make it worse. We segue, now, dad, to Shameful Act Number Two. I got plastered. I drink quite a bit here, you know; we all do. It's one of the few comforts we have. But it always nags at the back of our minds that our time isn't really our own; at any point, we might have an influx of wounded that we have to treat, or we might get hit ourselves, and we have to have a little cache of sobriety in reserve. So we stop shy of rip-roaring drunk. I didn't, this time. I think BJ, bless him, thought I was celebrating that Radar was still alive. But I don't drink like that out of happiness. I was trying to keep away the thought that I had almost killed that kid. I was trying to forget what he looked like on the table. And oh, lord, did I. I can't remember much of that night after a few shots; I have only vague memories of singing and yelling and getting dragged home by BJ. Then the _reason_ we don't drink like that happened; not two hours later, we had another influx of wounded. I was in the OR trying to patch kids up while I was dying of hangover. I couldn't do it; I had to leave my patient to that jackass Winchester while I tried to vomit away my viscera outside.

I've never been so ashamed in my life. And I've done some pretty shameful things.

Enough of that. On to Shameful Act Number Three. That's right, dad, they just keep on coming. I made up my mind to avoid the kid while he was recuperating. I couldn't face him; not with what I sent him into, not with the ass that I made of myself afterwards. But how can a surgeon stay out of post-op for a month? I knew I couldn't avoid him forever, so I screwed my courage to the sticking-place and headed on over to give him a little hearty bedside manner. I made some jokes. I pretended he was just another unlucky soldier. That didn't last long.

He had heard about the drunkenness, and I didn't deny it. But he wouldn't shut up about it - about how people looked up to me, about how I had let people down - and it made me mad as hell. I knew he meant I had let _him_ down. And the next thing I knew, I was watching some crazy man scream at the kid, calling him all kinds of horrid things. You'll say it was my frustration with and impotence regarding every damn thing over here finally coming out, dad, and of _course _it was. I'm a doctor, you know. I can correctly identify just about any bit of pathology I might evidence.

I was interrupted from chastising myself in my tent a short time later by Potter and Hotlips, duking it out for the chance to chastise me on top of that. I decided 'enough' at that point, and did the only halfway intelligent thing I've done throughout this entire episode; I went back to apologize. Quite an interesting apology. I had barely started on it when, wouldn't you know it, the kid got up and gave me one. He told me off better than I've ever been told off before. He gave me almost as much of a telling-off as I deserved. And you know, on some level, I was proud of the kid. Standing up for himself, loudly and clearly for once; being proud of who he was, not wanting to be someone he wasn't. I did rather wish, though, that it had come out as the result of something else. Winchester, for instance, who's always looking down on that boy; couldn't Radar have given _him _a good-sized chunk of mind?

Well, I let him tell me off, I left, and that was that. Between me feeling guilty and resentful, and him feeling whatever he was feeling, all was uncomfortably quiet between us for the rest of his recuperation. As befits two people who have been friends for as long as we have, we eventually let it all quietly die; we made the requisite uncomfortable overtures, and were soon talking more or less the same as we had before.

Sorry this has been such a long letter, dad, but it's almost over, I promise. Just one last incident. If you get shot up on the battlefield, you get a Purple Heart to feel better about it, whether you got shot before you shot someone else, got shot trying to save someone else, had a piece-of-crap gun blow up in your face, or get shelled on the way to a brothel. So yes, Radar got one, and I was the one who took it over to him, once he was recovered enough to be his normal phoning, filing, chirpy self, doing what needs to be done to make the place actually run.

He was, of course, terribly startled that anyone would give _him_ a medal. He got this terribly charming slightly-embarrassed smile on his face that he gets sometimes, and I wanted to keep it there for a while. So I told him I was going to do something I almost never do - and he was afraid I was going to kiss him. No, I saluted him - very smartly, dad, you'd be proud that those muscles haven't atrophied - but jesus, has the kid forgotten how many times I've kissed him? Just because it annoys him, of course, but I've tickled and smooched the guy as unprofessionally as I would a younger brother. Probably more than any one of the nurses, so far, although I'm working on that.

I suppose this is Shameful Act Number Four, although, thank god, it isn't an act as such. It's more like some disturbing sense that there are some acts out there I am capable of that I shouldn't be. Because, dad, when he mentioned kissing him, I was so tempted - it would be such a perfect big-brother thing to do, and it's something I would have done without a thought before all of this. But I just couldn't.

I've thought about it since then. I've thought about it rather a lot. You see, that part of Radar that stood up to me in post-op - that's not a new part of him, something that the army added. It's something that's always been there, underneath that soft, squishy exterior, and he just neededed to be prodded hard enough for him to show it. I had always looked at that naïveté he has as a defect, but it's not; it's a defense mechanism, a sword and shield to keep him alive and sane in this place. He might well be the sanest of all of us, at that.

I just can't look at him the same way anymore. I still want to make fun of him and hug him and kiss him, as I always did, and have a little bit of his chirpiness rub off on me - but he's not my little brother, in my eyes, anymore. He's a man, and that's a problem, isn't it? It's a pity, because you know how much I want a ticket out of here. But _this_ - well, dad, even though it's in the DSM, it's not a Section 8. It's a court-martial, and a little bit of unofficial facial rearrangement surgery done in the dead of night by a few muscle-bound soldiers.

So, there you are, dad. What do you think of your son now?

And for god's sake, if you have any good fatherly advice, now's a good time.

I miss you.

Much love,

Hawkeye


	2. Radar's POV

They don't call me Radar for nothin', you know. 

Well, some of it is just normal stuff. I have real good hearing, for one. I used to come runnin' when my mom would blow the dog whistle. Took her a while to figure that out. And it took me a while to figure out that I could hear stuff that other people can't. Here, that whup-whup of choppers sounds real loud to me by the time everyone else can just hear it.

I guess, if I paid attention, I could keep people from sneakin' up on me, but I keep forgettin'.

The rest of it is a little weird. Mom says I can read people. Cap'n Pierce says that I'm insightful, but won't tell me what that means. All I know is, I'll see someone or hear 'em comin', and I'll just want to say somethin', and it turns out to be what they're thinkin'. Funny, ain't it? Cap'n Pierce says it'd make people nervous if I weren't so short. He's not really funny, sometimes.

It's useful. It makes me a good clerk. I mean, bein' a clerk ain't all about deliverin' the mail and fillin' out forms and lockin' up the booze and the matches so the men don't get into the first and the rats won't get into the last. It's about makin' a duty roster that don't hack anyone off or put together two people who are goin' to be at each other's throats. It's about knowin' what we're goin' to need, and who's most likely to get it for us. Other outfits are always runnin' out of stuff. We run out of stuff, too, but not as much as the other units, and we never have a million of somethin' we can't use instead of what we need unless someone _else_ screws up. Just ask around. I do a good job of doin' my job.

This thing I got ain't always good, though. Like when Colonel Blake left. I woke up in the middle of the night just feelin' sick and empty, like Cap'n Pierce had gone in with a rusty scalpel and pulled out all my insides. I was all cold and sweaty for the rest of the night, and when I heard he died, I wasn't really all that surprised, you know? I still get this strange feelin' at night, now and then, like somethin' that should be there just ain't.

It's even weirder other times, though. Like when I feel like sayin' something, then I stop, and the person says somethin' else. They look at me funny when that happens, like I caught 'em without no pants on, or somethin'. The majors are like that a lot - Major Burns, when he was here, and Major Houlihan. It's like I'm gettin' what they want to say, and they're not sayin' it. I don't get that, at all - why they go around all of the time not sayin' what they mean. Cap'ns Pierce and Hunnicut ain't like that; they almost always say what they mean, even if it's talkin' down to me and callin' me little.

Almost always. Yeah, you heard me. I've had some weird stuff happen with them, too. Especially Pierce. Remember when I got shot up, a few months ago? Yeah, that's what I got this medal for. Ain't it pretty? I keep it in the drawer, here. I feel funny when I wear it, like I used to do when I was all dressed up for church on Sunday at home. I never told no one why I was out, because no one ever asked, but Pierce knows. I was headed out to a... you know... one of those places where the ladies are. So I don't really deserve that medal. But Cap'n Pierce gave it to me, so I can't really give it back.

Everyone knows now about us yellin' at each other in the hospital. That was a time when I knew what he was goin' to say, and he said it, and it just made me so mad. It was all shame and excuses and that thing where he felt like he was bein' put on - but dang it, he's a doctor, ain't he? He's supposed to be smarter than me, better than me, and it just made me so... darn... mad when he said I was layin' too much on his shoulders. Well, who else's can I, that's what I'd like to know!

But we kinda got over that, and went back to the way we used to be. Mostly. I mean, it was a little different. I felt like he was thinkin' about what he was goin' to say to me before he did, and he never really did that before. He still said a lot of the same things, but there was somethin' about how he said it that wasn't like before. But he still meant what he said, so it didn't really bug me.

Except for when he gave me that medal, and said he was goin' to do somethin' he usually didn't. He whipped me that salute, but I swear ta you, that's not what he was thinkin'. I'm not sure what he was thinkin'; it was all complicated and he didn't like it, I could tell. He was kinda embarassed about it, whatever it was. But I can't stop thinkin' about it, because I still get little bits of it, now and then.

They don't call me Radar for nothin', after all.

I kinda wish he woulda told me, though. I mean, how bad can it've been?


End file.
